19" LCD Monitors Roundup. Part IX.. Page 4

The new round of 19-inch LCD monitors testing will focus on the solutions using TN matrixes. We will look at a few widescreen models as well as those with the traditional 5:4 screen ratio from Acer, ASUS, NEC, Samsung and ViewSonic.

The monitor’s default brightness and contrast are set at 77% and 50%, respectively. I reduced them both to 37% to achieve a 100nit brightness of white. Increasing the contrast setting to 70% and higher makes light halftones indistinguishable from pure white. Dark halftones are reproduced well at any value of contrast. Color gradients are displayed perfectly, without banding, too. The monitor regulates its brightness by means of pulse-width modulation of the power of the backlight lamps at a frequency of 300Hz.

The brightness uniformity for white is 4.9% on average with a maximum deflection of 13.2%. For black, the numbers are 4.5% and 17.8%. These are good results.

The gamma curves are close to the theoretical one at both the default and 100nit settings. There are no serious distortions of color reproduction.

The color temperature setup is not that good, though. White differs greatly from dark halftones in every mode (the User mode is set up differently than the other two by default), and there’s a big enough difference between the halftones as well. Moreover, the monitor doesn’t offer a warm color temperature: its Warm mode is not really warm.

The monitor’s color gamut is overall standard but somewhat larger in reds than usual.

The response time average is 11.8 milliseconds (GtG) with a maximum of 22.4 milliseconds. Of course, the X192W is somewhat faster than the previous model but can stand no comparison with RTC-enabled monitors.

The measured contrast ratio turns to be lower than the specified one, as usual. It is however high enough for a TN matrix, over 400:1 in two out of the three test modes.

So the Acer X192W can make a good home monitor for users who won’t mind its viewing angles and matrix speed. It’s got a nice appearance, a good gamma curve setup, and a uniform backlight. The only real drawbacks are the low quality of the color temperature setup and the small range of the setup options.